Slam is the youngest form of urban poetry, but has the most potential to be accepted all around the world. Many people cannot relate to certain types of music, but they all understand and respect the power of the word.

It's impossible to draw a line between poetry and music, but if you think about the origins, these are so far away from each other. Music used to be a form of entertainment to be heard, and poetry used to be a form of expression to be read. Although they are continously making steps towards each other.Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was the man who made the first step, and was followed by rap and spoken-word. On the other side we had performance poetry for a long time ago, and slam filled the space from the late 80s.

Slam is a good form for socially conscious urban artists to reach the intelligent middle-class, who usually ignore urban music, because of the 'west-coast gangsters' and explicit lyrics. It helped artists like Mos Def, Common…